D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote on 2023-04-04 15:07:

| I suspect it has to do with manual installation: those types of packages are | flagged as to not be auto-removed, so something. | | | See if gitlab shows up in: | | apt-mark showmanual

Quite right: gitlab-runner is there. And a bunch of other stuff.

I'm used to Red Hat's dnf which replaces old versions with new ones. At least I think that it does.

# apt list --installed gitlab-runner Listing... Done gitlab-runner/stretch,now 15.10.1 amd64 [installed] N: There are 152 additional versions. Please use the '-a' switch to see them.

Does this mean that 153 versions are installed? I imagine not.

I don't see gitlab-runner as a package in my Ubuntu repos, but I believe the 153 versions are all different versions that currently exist in the repo. I tested this with Firefox, and `apt show firefox` contained:

Version: 111.0.1+build2-0ubuntu0.22.04.1~mt1

...

"N: There are 2 additional records. Please use the -a switch to see them."

Whereas `apt show firefox -a` indicates there are versions 110.x, 111.x and snap available. So, all the un-removed packages in cache corresponding with existing entries in the repo may explain why `apt autoclean` didn't clear up much space (if I recall the situation correctly), since `man apt autoclean` says:

autoclean (and the auto-clean alias since 1.1) Like clean, autoclean clears out the local repository of retrieved package files. The difference is that it only removes package files that can no longer be downloaded "Can no longer be downloaded"...

Still, weird that the repo contains so many out-of-date versions; I'd have expected them to be removed when they're deprecated. Also, I *think* that's where `apt mark minimize-manual` can clear out some of the cruft that exists post-upgrade. Might be worth a try? rb [Re-directed this to the mailing list, since hopefully there's something of interest to the general community in here and nothing confidential.]